Adoration of the Magi (Sequeira)

The painting was completed in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, in the summer of 1828,^[5] during a very particular time in the author's life. Domingos Sequeira had been exiled from his country since 1823, following the Vilafrancada uprising and the fall of the Vintist movement with which he had collaborated. Sequeira had recently returned to Italy, where he had studied and worked until 1795. He rejoined the Accademia di San Luca, and became, in 1829, a founding member of the Società degli Amatori e Cultori dei Belle Arti. When the Società held its first exhibition in the rooms of the Campidoglio in 1830, Sequeira sends his Adoration of the Magi, along with the Descent from the Cross that preceded it by a year, to great critical acclaim.^[5] According to Sequeira's son-in-law João Pedro de Carvalho e Brito, in a letter addressed in 1846 to the Marquis of Lavradio, Sequeira "did not paint [the Palmela Series] by commission, but did so motu proprio, to show the artists of Rome, his old friends, the manner by which one should paint." For this reason, Sequeira scholar Alexandra Markl has called the Adoration of the Magi "a veritable manifest on Sequeira's thoughts on the path the art of painting ought to follow in his time".^[6]

To prepare the work, Sequeira made a main preparatory study, in charcoal and white chalk, on the same scale as the final painting. Then, he made individual, detailed sketches of some of the figures, to hone postures, gestures, and facial expressions: there are more than twenty-five such sketches.^[4] These are all part of the collections of the National Museum of Ancient Art; they were purchased for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, an institutional ancestor of the museum, in 1878, following the death of the Marquis of Sousa Holstein.^[7] José-Augusto França compares the skill Sequeira shows in these sketches as a draftsman to that of Tintoretto.^[1]

The work remained with the descendants of Pedro de Sousa Holstein, 1st Duke of Palmela, who bought it in 1845 from Sequeira's daughter Mariana Benedita, along with the four other paintings that comprise the Palmela Series, until 2016. A public fundraising campaign called "Vamos pôr o Sequeira no Lugar Certo" (Let's put the Sequeira in the right place), launched in October 2015, counted with the small contributions of thousands of private citizens, institutions, companies, schools, local governments, and even President Rebelo de Sousa;^[8] the largest contribution, of 200 thousand euros, was made by the Aga Khan Foundation in the person of Prince Amyn Aga Khan.^[9] The campaign raised more than 745 thousand euros, surpassing the 600 thousand the owners asked for — the leftover revenue was set aside to buy another painting, in 2018: a 15th-century Annunciation by Álvaro Pires de Évora, sold in a Sotheby's auction in New York.^[10]

The painting then underwent restoration by the Museum's Department for Conservation and Restoration, for two months: even though it was in very good state of preservation, restorers removed applications of old oxidised varnish that gave the painting a yellowish hue and concealed some detail, as well as minor overpainting. The restoration work revealed new information about the painting, namely, that Sequeira had used his own fingerprints to give texture to the mantles of the Magi, and that the artist made very little alteration to the compositions seen in the underdrawing.^[11]

The painting was unveiled on 14 July 2016, on the same day as the newly renovated gallery of 12th to 19th-century Portuguese painting and sculpture.^[12]

• Media related to The Adoration of the Magi by Domingos Sequeira, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga at Wikimedia Commons